Smartlogik Discover (APR)

Background

The Muscat search engine comes from research performed by Dr. Martin Porter
of Cambridge University (UK), and was commercialized in 1984 by Cambridge
CD Publishing. It was subsequently sold to MAID which became The Dialog Corporation
and in 2000 changed its name to Bright Station plc: it seems to have been
spun off in 2001 to Smartlogik. In April 2002, the assets of Smartlogik were
bought by Applied Psychology Research
Ltd. APR offers support for existing users of Muscat/Smartlogik software
and continues to develop products based on the technology.

June 2002: Muscat users can contact Lemur
Consulting for support such as a spidering/indexing system.

Features

Can index free text such as web pages

Also has tools for extracting data from structured datasets
like Oracle or Lotus Notes.

Articles

Unstructured
Information Management ReportInfosphere, March, 2003 by Magnus Stensmo
and Mikael Thorson, $325/€295 for a single PDF licenseGeneral report on search and categorization tools. Describes how the
APR Smartlogik search and categorization system integrates with user profiling
for better results. Considers this to be a "solid market offering".

Seeking
far and wide for the right dataInfoWorld, August 27 / September 3,
2001 by Cathleen Moore.
Describes the value of search engines and categorization as essential elements
of corporate portal infrastructures, to handle the "deluge" of information
within enterprises. Quotes Aberdeen analyst Guy Creese who points out that
without a good way to search, corporations would be "blowing their investment
in the content". Covers recent announcements of search and categorization
features by Autonomy, Verity,
AltaVista, iPhrase,
and Smartlogik (Muscat).

Search
technology gains recognitionInfoWorld, July 30, 2001 by Cathleen Moore
Covers search and categorization technology for corporations from Verity
and Smartlogik (Muscat). Includes analyst quotes about the importance
of search in handling huge amounts of content. Describes Verity "Social
Networks" using business rules to make taxonomies more useful. Smartlogik's
Muscatdiscovery search engine stresses natural-language searching, Muscatstructure
provides rules-based categorization, both can integrate into application servers
using Java or COM+.